If you scoured the games industry from top to bottom, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cooler dude than Masaya Matsuura, President of Japanese developer NanaOn-Sha. Mind you, geekishness isn’t a quality you would expect to find in a man who, from 1983 to 1996, was the talent behind the dodgily apostrophised and enormously successful J-Pop band, Psy’s (pronounced “Size”).

Being a pop star wasn’t enough for Matsuura, though. He first encountered Ken Kutaragi, legendary “Father of the PlayStation”, when Kutaragi-san was working on the ill-fated SNES-CD for Nintendo’s Super Famicom, which eventually evolved into the original PlayStation. And, in 1996, Matsuura had some sort of epiphany, during which he decided that videogames were the way forward.

The first fruit of that Damascene conversion remains one of the best-loved and cutest games ever, PaRappa The Rapper, which pretty much invented the rhythm action game and, as well as the eponymous rapping dog, featured a karate-master with an onion for a head, a Rasta frog and a sequence in which you baked a cake. Matsuura followed that up with the more rock-oriented Um Jammer Lammy (nobody does better game names than Matsuura) and the noodle-fixated PaRappa The Rapper 2.

But, for us, Matsuura’s finest moment so far was 1999’s Vib-Ribbon, which we reckon comes as close to art as any game ever. It’s doubtful whether there has ever been a more minimal game than Vib-Ribbon. It’s black and white, for a start, and its graphics are not so much 2D as one-dimensional – you control a character who evolves from a frog into a rabbit, drawn as if with one stroke of a pencil, walking across the screen on a tightrope. Having loaded the game, you removed the disk and inserted your favourite music CD, and the tightrope would develop differently shaped discontinuities, in time with the music (Vib-Ribbon was fearsomely hard if you put, say, some drum and bass in your PlayStation), which you would negotiate by pressing different buttons at the right time. These days, copies of Vib-Ribbon change hands for serious amounts of money. You can check out its charms here.

Matsuura also created a sequel for Vib-Ribbon called Mojib-Ribbon, which somehow extracted gameplay from Japanese calligraphy, although sadly, it never got a proper UK release. In recent years, Matsuura has creted a number of Tamagotchi Connection games for Nintendo’s DS, as well as Musika, a music game custom-designed for the iPod. A dog-lover, he also crafted a load of music and sounds for Sony’s (now sadly discontinued) robot dog, the Aibo ERS-7. PaRappa reappeared this year for the PSP, although it remains doubtful whether we will ever get any PS3 instalments. However, you can bet that whatever Matsuura is working on next will be wacky, innovative and utterly beguiling.